Posted
by
EditorDavid
on Saturday December 16, 2017 @05:44PM
from the local-newspapers dept.

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
Google moved to strip from its news search results publications that mask their country of origin or intentionally mislead readers, a further step to curb the spread of fake news that has plagued internet companies this year. To appear in Google News results, websites must meet broad criteria set out by the company, including accurately representing their owners or primary purposes. In an update to its guidelines released Friday, the search giant added language stipulating that publications not "engage in coordinated activity to mislead users."

Additionally the new rules read: "This includes, but isn't limited to, sites that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or are directed at users in another country under false premises." A popular tactic for misinformation campaigns is to pose as a credible U.S. news outlet. Russian Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed organization, used that technique to reach an audience of nearly 500,000 people, spread primarily through Twitter accounts, Bloomberg reported earlier.

Procreation is essential to the survival of any species, yet homosexuality precludes those individuals from doing so.

No, it doesn't. Homosexuality indicates that they enjoy sexual activity with the same sex. It doesn't mean they can't procreate, or that they won't. Nor does it mean that the homosexual cannot, or will not, adopt. If they are prevented from adopting, that's a social issue — not a sexual one.

Turn in your Vulcan card as you leave the building, thanks for playing. There's a helpful novitia

Actually, I believe that homosexual males are less likely to procreate themselves, but are more likely to have older brothers who are not homosexual. I could have read the statistics slightly wrong, as I wasn't that interested. It's from the current issue of New Scientist, but they were referring to a study somebody (I don't remember who) did. So if you're interested follow it up there.

OTOH, there's a lot of cultural influence. During the classical period most male citizens of Sparta were homosexuals, a

not new though.Google started dropping user generated content from all its services around the time google+ flopped.even a search for âoebeforeitsnews.comâ often returns links to CNN ffs. (although not at the moment it seems).

then they crippled search suggestions by removing the most searched for words (like âstar wars torrentâ)

The idea of clinging to your state government is a function of nationalism. This is what drove Brexit. To some degree, this also drives the idea of Federalism. We want to be distinct enough to control our own destiny and not be subject to the whims of idiots we don't agree with.

You will whine about Russian meddling and then happily meddle in someone else's election in another state (like Alabama).

"This includes, but isn't limited to, sites that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or are directed at users in another country under false premises." A popular tactic for misinformation campaigns is to pose as a credible U.S. news outlet.

How about 'home grown" internet sites that actually manufacture fake news? One such site was mentioned by our president recently.

The problem is, although that article sparked a torrent of fake claims, everything actually presented in that article was verified. None of the "fakeness" came from the article, only by people repeating the information and adding hyperbole. John Podesta did get an invite, it was a spirit co

It's an interesting idea. May I remind you that the Egyptian goddess Maat, normally called the goddess of truth, was actually the goddess of the officially accepted belief. And would you consider the meaning of the Russian word "Pravda", which is, I believe, translated as "the official truth".

I'm not real thrilled with corporate "truths", but they may be superior to political ones.

Who do you trust to determine that something is a lie?It's quite reasonable for someone handing you a link to say "by the way, *I* wouldn't trust that" (or "*I* would"). That lets you decide how much you trust their evaluation. To just hide the data, however, marks *you* as untrustworthy even if the data *was* untrustworthy.

That's nice when you can manage it, but often there is only one original source for certain information. In that case, multiple sources pointing to the same original source don't help. And multiple sources editorializing about it, but not pointing to it are all untrustworthy.

If you're a search engine, just give me the link, and if you want to tell me you don't trust it at the same time, that's fine. If I trust you, maybe I'll consider your opinion.

Let them do what they want- I won't be using Google News as long as they waste my screen space and my time. Why do they need three columns, two of which are mostly empty, for their presentation? Why do they need, in addition to the three columns, a header and a footer? Why do I only get 4 headlines per page-down, on a page 4 feet long?

Yes Slashdot and many other sites are also guilty. But you might expect Google to be more thoughtful; to offer some design leadership.

So much wasted space on this newest version of the google news site, the previous version was tolerable but this new version is stupid. I still look at it every so often to see if they pulled their head out of their ass but no not yet.

The whitespace 'craze' is very overdone now, people didn't seem to catch the part where its a good technique to promote something special and have it stick out but to use it everywhere is dumb.

I had finally enough of google news and went to Bing news [bing.com]. Even though I hate Microsoft... this Google arrogance is really getting to me. Bing news format is a lot better, it presents a lot more articles, and it has a politics section, which is about the only thing I read these days.

We're making a bunch of private rules which are ill-defined, fuzzy, and overly broad. We're going to couple these with selective enforcement backed by AI algorithms using a high false-positive rate, and use it to remove sites without warning or identifying what specific sections are in violation or what rules are violated.

In that way, Google will strip out all fake news, ensuring that only true and correct news remains.

The far right is a disease. Diseases infect opportunistically. In a healthy democracy, the press is the immune system to such a disease. The flaws in our heavily consolidated media, with very strong pro-corporate values, have failed to function because they've prioritized access to politicians over their duty to hold politicians responsible. Congress has unbelievably low approval ratings, because they are accurately perceived as bought-off scumbags. And the media rarely bothers to press politicians to a

It's not about whether or not we should stop/fight the far-right. AmiMoJo already established that as something necessary. My point was that, if you think it's necessary to stop them, you should use methods that will actually work.

Also, my solution is the very opposite of purging. I'm saying the way to stop alt-right false propaganda is with ACTUAL GODDAMN JOURNALISM. If CNN hadn't been complete horseshit for over a decade, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Where I come from, virtually every product you can buy is required, by law, to be labelled with its country of origin. If you buy French cheese or German beer or Spanish olives, you can be confident that they really were produced in those countries.

There's no restriction to freedom of speech involved here. If you want to produce a news page about events in, say, Egypt from the USA, you can do that. Or if you want to comment on US news from Moldavia, there's nothing to s

You should get the Blinkers [wikipedia.org] browser extension. You tell it whether you're a Republican or Democrat and it filters out any sites that might cause you unpleasant cognitive dissonance and only shows you stuff you'll agree with.

Who needs a scapegoat? The responsibility for Trump's election is obvious. A faulty electoral system and an entrenched partisan division that would lead to a pair of space aliens being the leading contenders if they had the proper letter across from their names.

There's no desperation, except by those who are frenetically in denial that their standard-bearer is a corrupt, lying, fraudulent, pompous, charade of a man, and the fact is, we have needed help to sort through the lies, that's why dozens of websi

This is a very reasonable form of defense (this is information warfare after all) but I hope they coordinate with other sites too. Sure they know a bunch of Twitter accounts point to false/misleading news but will they then automatically alert Twitter so that they can investigate and possibly take down rings of accounts created to mislead or halt the links made by fooled bystanders?

I know this is a dangerous technology because it can be misused but the same could be said about the internet but we still hav

Defense against what? Hackers that leak emails proving that the mainstream media is in bed with the DNC? Controversial trolls that force people to question the political dogmas? I think we need more of those, not less.

In any event, Google can apply their biased filters as much as they want to promote their social agenda, all it will achieve is that people will realize that they are as dishonest and misleading as CNN. They're driving themselves into irrelevance.

I never heard anyone telling people to question dogma, only to switch from one dogma to the other.

That's how America worked since the Mason-Dixon line. But recently a few big tech companies and the mainstream media have decided that one of the dogmas didn't deserve to be discussed anymore, discarding the fact that 49% of the population thinks otherwise, and they have used their power to push their agenda.

We need (at least) two points of view. But real ones. You know what I want for Christmas? Politicians who actually represent the values of their party and who go head to head on real issues, instead of

Liars and frauds. If you're pretending to be a large American company when you're a single guy in a basement in Minsk, we've already established that you're a liar. No need to give you any free publicity.

Defense against what? Hackers that leak emails proving that the mainstream media is in bed with the DNC? Controversial trolls that force people to question the political dogmas?

No, defense against propaganda that is intended to intensify the divisions within out nation. What they do does not make people question their politics but rather harden people in their viewpoints. I'm all for exposing corruption but their goal is simply to cause civil unrest and promote political extremism to fuel that agenda.

I very much want to what you are claiming they do but the fact is that they are making people more extreme in their viewpoints and normalizing that extremism.

No, defense against propaganda that is intended to intensify the divisions within out nation. What they do does not make people question their politics but rather harden people in their viewpoints

Take a chill pill, then look at what you're saying. It is absurd. In terms of paranoia and conspiracy theory, it's getting closer and closer to the level of David Icke and his lizard overlords.

You are merely repeating a narrative that has been cooked up to keep you distracted from the DNC leaked emails and that somehow turned into a shitstorm because clickbaiting has replaced journalism. It's not a conspiracy, it's a perfect storm of political meddling, opportunism, greed and short-term thinking. It's Wag t

Let's be clear. The same rationale from the same company has already been extensively to undermine independent left media. It stands to reason that the same would probably happen here. Blame it on the weakness of algorithms or blame it on the influence of large media corporations, but that's what happened before, and that's what will likely happen again.

Yes, the Youtube monetization issues. Taking away the majority of the money they receive would be undermining them. They sold that bullshit with the exact same pitch as this, so I expect similar results.

The Humanist Report isn't a news source, though; it is a podcast. "TYT" (The Young Turks) is a youtube (google) channel that is also on some cable networks. David Pakman is a TV and internet video commentator.

None of that is crap that would be on Google News. The Google News format is that of an aggregator of internet newspapers. They then also link videos related to the story. The videos linked are generally news videos, not commentary.

I understand, you only watch and listen, you don't read. But still, yo

I didn't say "news source," I said "independent left media." All of those are independent left media. I didn't say that those particular people would be hit by this, but that the niche of "left-wing media that doesn't constantly suck off corporations" would probably be collateral damage under this change, just like they were under the adpocalypse.

No, we don't have an example of how censorship would play out here, because they haven't done this kind of censorship yet. But because I'm not naive, I reali

No, things that are not news are not part of news aggregation will not be "collateral damage" under these changes. Is that actually hard? Are you sure that you're not naive? I mean, imagine how embarrassingly credulous you would have to be for it to be all that, with no contribution from naivete! You're not doing yourself any favors with that argument.

If you can't tell what censorship is, then it should be no surprise at all that some of things you falsely regard as "censorship" do not affect people in the ways that real censorship is believed to. Duh.

For example, if a person thought that removing wrong answers from math tables was censorship, and they started talking about the effects of removing those wrong answers, they might be very surprised to learn that nobody else can perceive anything but positive results from the change! Even though all the sam

If you had a real argument, you wouldn't need to be such a condescending cunt. You have the same kind of undeserved hubris that managed to lose a general election to a moron with no frontal lobe inhibition. You could have reasonably accuse me of being overly paranoid, but then it would point out the idiocy of your previous naivety claims, since I have the cynicism high ground, by far.

So now, you've got to claim that I don't read, with the only evidence being that I brought up Youtube users over Youtube'

Google, Facebook, Twitter are actively engaged in pro-liberal agendas. CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post as well.

There is a reason why over the last century or so the first thing that leaders of military coups used to do was to take control of national radio, newspapers and later tv stations. It's because when you control information, you control people.

Yes, there's breitbart and fox news and a few others, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to the giant liberal players. I don't know ho

Presumably Google AI is now able to read the minds of people posting articles to know their intention they harbor in their hearts with over 98% accuracy. Sometimes even when even the said people are completely unaware of it!

Well, if people don't like it, they'll switch to some other search engine. Like Bing.

If you believe in the free market, this isn't something you should complain about, and if you believe in monopolies this isn't something you should complain about. It's only reasonable to complain if you believe that the government should micromanage the economy.

Oddly enough, despite the preceding paragraph it does bother me. I *want* them to post "informational decals" on the web page searches, like "we judge this site

There is a difference between believing in the free market as a concept and believing that the western economy is a free market. It is not. It's a corporate welfare state. The government is identical with publicly traded companies and it does micromanage the economy. What is the Federal Reserve Bank?We have been invaded and the vast majority of people who have stood up against the invaders since the Civil War (English or American, either is applicable) have been demonized and everyone who falls for the narr

It is only reasonable to disagree if you believe something absurd, so agree with me I demand it

No, actually, that is totally whack and you're full of shit. What news is on which aggregator has nothing to do with the gubermint, and nothing to do with "managing the economy."

No surprise that you then want people to re-post propaganda they know is propaganda. There is nothing odd about it at all, just look at the rest of your statement. But they're not going to do that for you; that would be stupid. For them. And not because of complicated things like lizard people controlling the gubermint. Because it i

What I do care on the other hand is that fox news is spreading blatant lies. People keep complaining about "fake news" but the reality is one of the biggest purveyor was not the russian (which *maybe* did it for the election) but fox news which does it 365 days/year. They distort most of the time and outright lies sometimes. That may be my scientific training, I can't stand such bullshitter attitude.

A search engine that actually searches for the news and terms, topics..
How innovative that would be to get real news results that have not been altered by SJW...
No deranking, no censorship, no removal of news. Let the user find what they want with a new search engine that works as it should...

Why not let me decide what news is "fake" or fake? Censorship is a very slippery slope, and what starts as a well-meaning effort always ends up getting taken over. Let me inform myself and choose which source can be trusted and which ones need to be tossed out. I realize that Google can choose what sources it puts up on its website, and the criteria does make sense. But where does it stop?

Censorship is rarely if ever the answer. The fact that a giant alt left company is doing it does not make it better. The solution to propaganda and disinformation is more accurate, factual information, and historical perspective.

The reason we are in this mess to begin with is the news media degenerated from it's original goal of reporting "Just the facts, mam." to actively shilling for the alt left and the Democrats, often using he said/she said with no underlying facts or background on the parties invol

I'm getting loads of of French and Polish spam on my gmail accounts.
Go Ogle wants to serve Norwegian ads on my phone when I'm connected on my Wi-FI network. I live 80 miles from the Norwegian border the way bird flies. My landlord is getting the Internet and IP-television from Viasat, a Norwegian company.